Advertising is an essential element of any successful business enterprise. Without having the consumer learn about a producer's or manufacturer's product or service, the consumer will not know of that product or service and will therefore not be prone to buying, subscribing, renting, leasing and/or obtaining that product or service. Furthermore, where a number of various competing products exist, it is important to obtain product differentiation in order to achieve a large market share.
Typically, advertising is accomplished via broadcasting, whether it be a television or radio commercial, billboard, magazine, newspaper, or more recently Internet based advertisement. That is, an advertiser places a single advertisement in a particular media and hopes that those people who might be most interested will see and be influenced by that advertisement. Unfortunately, this strategy can be wasteful since only a very small fraction of the people who will view or hear the advertisement will ever have any intention of acting on the information provided therein. In this regard, millions of dollars are spent by advertisers in order to place advertisements in media pertaining to a demographic that corresponds to the product or service being advertised.
Furthermore, as most people understand, advertisements are usually produced by advertisement agencies and people have become increasingly skeptical of any claims made in connection with a particular product or service. In some instances, celebrity testimonials are used in order to gain the confidence of consumers and convince them that the product or service is advantageous from other competing products or services. Such testimonials, however, have been overused and are of decreasing significance in actually persuading consumers to purchase a product or service.
Further still, due to the fast pace of certain markets, particularly the computer, Internet and data processing fields, by the time an advertisement is prepared by an advertisement agency, and thereafter printed in a publication the advertisement may no longer be intriguing or “eye catching.”
To overcome some of the above deficiencies, advertisers have resorted to the Internet and the ever expanding user base thereof. Typically, Internet based advertisements will be in the form of a “banner,” which is a graphic image displayed on a web browser of a person accessing the Internet. This “banner” may be animated and will include a message to a visitor of the Internet site generally encouraging the user to “click” the banner and thus access another site for more detailed information on the product or service being advertised. While such advertisements can be quickly and cheaply generated, they still suffer from many of the deficiencies of traditional advertisers; namely difficulties in targeting desired audiences and low effectiveness.
Conventional advertisements, however, including internet “banner” advertisements are often transitory and are lost or forgotten after being viewed by a potential purchaser. Even if a user revisits an Internet site, the advertisement previously displayed is often replaced by another, different advertisement since such sites routinely change or rotate the displayed advertisement. Similarly, many broadcast advertisements are lost after being viewed by the consumer and thus the consumer can no longer locate advertisement related information in the event they later decide to purchase the advertised product or service.
Another Internet based approach has been developed in order to more accurately target possible consumers. This approach operates in connection with one of the many Internet based search engines, such as that found at www.metacrawler.com, www.lycos.com, or www.altavista.com for example. When a user queries the search engine, context sensitive advertisements are displayed together with the users search results. Thus, if the user queries on “Hawaii travel,” for example, his search results will include banner advertisements for travel related services. While such advertisements are more directly targeted, they reach a relatively smaller audience than do broadcast advertisements.
With the recent almost universal acceptance of electronic mail (e-mail), advertisers have also begun to use unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE), commonly referred to as SPAM, to advertise their products and services. UCE, however, is often viewed with disgust by recipients since it is viewed as invading the user's privacy, clutters their computer system, and may adversely affect the operation thereof. As such, most users delete such messages without reading them, and those that do read them often form unfavorable opinions of the products and services offered due to their negative impressions of the form of delivery and the interruption. Therefore, many advertisers avoid the use of UCE in fear that the image of their product or service will in fact be harmed.
Other forms of advertising are continuing to become more prevalent as advertisers look for better ways to reach consumers. Once such advertisement is found in voice communications made using a standard public switched telephone system. When placing a long distance call, for example, a short recording is played to the originator to indicate the brand of long distance service being used. As a further example, when a user contacts an operator or directory assistance, a recording indicates to the user the name of the telephone company that the user is connected with. While this provides further advertisement for the companies involved, such recording is only evident to the person initiating the communication, who often already subscribes to or uses the service being advertised. Therefore, while such advertisement may be useful to maintain brand loyalty, it is ineffective to recruit new customers to the companies product or service.
It is clear that a need exists for a new system and method for advertising that overcomes the above deficiencies by providing a system and method that delivers advertisements to consumers in a useful, valuable, meaningful, locally stored and interactive fashion.